OK, apologies up front everyone: I’m on the road for family obligations this weekend. So instead of writing up tonight’s “Saturday Night Live” in my man cave, I’m doing this from the nation’s capital. Live from Washington D.C.: it’s Ryan McGee! I have the show in my hotel room, but without the beauty of DVR, I may miss a little more than usual in tonight’s recap. I ask that you are patient with me this week as Emma Stone and Coldplay both return to Studio 8-H. Coldplay is here to promote their new record “Mylo Xyloto,” while Stone doesn’t have anything she’s here to push, other than maybe the DVD release of “Crazy, Stupid, Love”. That’s fine, since she was a game host last year. Biggest question of the night: how will “SNL” handle this week’s Oscars’ debacle? Will they go after Brett Ratner and former “SNL” alum Eddie Murphy in a meaningful way, or just relegate their pot shots to “Weekend Update” jokes?

I’ve said this before, but I think it’s worth repeating in light of tonight’s episode of “Fringe.” In writing about the works either inspired by or directly overseen by J.J. Abrams, certain “patterns,” if you will, have emerged. These patterns extend to both the abstract and the concrete. The former is marked by having mysteries, time travel, and near operatic family issues. The latter is marked by a recurrence of certain objects (red balls, Slusho) and numbers. I think the red balls and fictional drinks are amusing Easter Eggs, but I think the numbers speak to something else at the heart of what I call “Earth-J.J.”: there are things in this world that are unimportant until certain people pour importance into them. Both “Alias” and “Lost” used certain numbers as a way to signify connections between events, but ultimately revealed the connection inherent in those numbers to be people. In humanizing the abstract, Earth-J.J. shows just how interconnected we all are.

Now that Alexandria has been eliminated, It’s time to get out of the country before she exacts her revenge. So where will we be headed? As we learned last episode, it’s gonna be Greece, but before we can reach for the spanakopita (assuming any of these girls really eat) we have to meet with Andre Leon Talley! He arrives in his straw Chinese boatman hat with two plate-breaking waiters to announce the new overseas trip.

Watching “Glee” on a weekly basis is like playing a high-stakes poker game in a Vegas casino. The show is the house, and the house almost always wins. “Winning” in this case means that the show takes not only your chips, but also your heart and soul as well. But every once in a while, the player beats the house, and their efforts are rewarded. After one of the worst episodes in the show’s history, “Glee” bounced back something fierce with “The First Time,” an episode that should have gone completely off the rails but managed to stay on the tracks and build confidence throughout the hour.

Look: it wasn’t perfect. No episode of “Glee” ever was nor ever will be. You could pick nits in nearly every scene. But the episodes of the show make you stop looking at the flaws and appreciate the emotional responses it can elicit when everything aligns correctly. No more ginger supremacists, leprechauns, or student/teacher trysts. (Unless you count that awful number inside Dalton Academy which, like the second season of “Friday Night Lights,” we’ll all agree never happened.) Instead, we got two things that generally make for a stellar episode of “Glee”: thematic resonance between various storylines, and musical performances that actually comment upon those resonances. This sounds like an easy thing to do. The sum total of “Glee” to date suggests the opposite. So let’s celebrate when it gets things right.

I’ve been plenty hard on “Terra Nova” these past few months. I don’t regret it, but I’m running out of finding new ways to tell you the same reasons it doesn’t work. Because by and large, each episode is a variation on one of the systemic problems that keep this show from at least being entertaining. (I’m not sure it will ever get to “good,” but the masochist in me keeps hope alive.) No show with time travel, dinosaurs, and conspiracies that cross both centuries and realities should be this pedestrian. Yet, here we are. “Nightfall” was probably the best episode since the pilot, but saying that is damning it with faint praise.

But rather than have me tell you why it’s faint praise, I chose to follow the lead of the show and lean on my inside man to tell you what went down tonight. That’s right: it’s not only the Sixers that have a double agent in their midst. Me? I got my buddy Nyko on the scene to give you all the insider perspective. Who is Nyko? He’s a nykoraptor, of course: a fictional dinosaur made up for the show in case any remaining velociraptors might sue for defamation. (OK, fine: that’s probably not the real reason. But I like the idea of velociraptors and cavemen hanging out, both complaining about stereotypes perpetrated against them by modern pop culture.)

I asked Nyko to give me an up close and personal view of life in his homeland since Taylor and Company burst through the portal and set up camp. Take it away, Nyko!

“Saturday Night Live” is back, after a much-needed two-week hiatus. On tap tonight: Charlie Day, best known for his work on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, and Maroon 5, best known for having its lead singer be one of the judges on “The Voice.” I kid! Day also has plenty of recent cinematic experience with one Jason Sudeikis, so look for a lot of pairings between them. Then again, there was very little interaction between Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig a few weeks back, so anything is possible. What’s a definite: if “SNL” attempts a dumbed-down “Sunny” sketch, I might hurl my laptop at the screen. Hopefully there’s something in my HitFix contract that states they will reimburse me if that happens.

We learned last week that The Observers are probably St. Louis Cardinals fans. How else to explain the machinations that led to the delay of this week’s “Fringe”? Maybe the return of Peter Bishop to the show prompted them to realize that they needed to interfere more, not less, with the course of human history. Who knows? In any case, we’re back tonight with “Novation,” an episode that re-inserted Peter Bishop into the mix but didn’t really solve any of the problems that his absence created. If that sentence makes your blood boil, don’t bother to read on. I promise I won’t take it personally. For the rest of you? Let’s continue.

It’s only fitting that the title of the episode comes from the legal system. Novation refers to the replacement of one obligation with a new one, or replacing a party involved in said obligation with a new member. Given the shapeshifting nature of tonight’s plot, the title is clearly meant to be ironic. But the tortured definition offers a few sentences ago speaks volumes about the insane narrative weight under which the show is currently operating. If the title of the episode meant to evoke the ways in which the new breed of shapeshifters can weave their way even more insidiously into our world, it also evoked the reality that Peter’s presence only leads to a new set of conundrums to replace the old ones.

I mean, where to even begin, people? It’s been weeks since last we saw “Glee,” and its return had me wishing that the baseball playoffs had lasted another three rounds. At gunpoint, I’d still rank the “Rocky Horror”-inspired episode of this show as its worse, but Lord, did tonight’s “Pot of Luck” give that hot mess a run for its money. Even by the show’s own less-than-lofty standards, this was a mishmash of disparate elements that confused “stringing together forty minutes of material” with “actually producing an episode of television.” We saw some hopes for this show’s future before its sports-induced hiatus, but this episode pretty much washed all of those away in a flood of stupidity.

Let’s state this up front: telling a long-form narrative is incredibly, incredibly hard. When it’s done well, it represents a monumental achievement. So saying “Terra Nova” is pretty terrible at it isn’t quite the slam it might seem. It just means the show is just as bad as the majority of other television shows currently on right now. By now, it’s abundantly clear that the show barely thought past the pilot in terms of creating a far-reaching story that would sustain a single season, never mind a multitude of them. But that need not be a deal breaker for the show, so long as it recognizes its own limitations. But as long as it fails to do so, this will be an expensive misfire for FOX.